Our Mission

Pain is a critical problem in health care: it affects millions of individuals, costs billions of dollars, and is a major cause of morbidity, suffering, and suicide. No objective test for pain currently exists. Chronic pain (e.g., neuropathic pain) in particular is difficult to treat because we have little understanding of the altered plasticity in neural circuitry that precedes this condition. In addition, we do not have an objective method of diagnosing neuropathic pain. Finally, while peripheral mechanisms of neuropathic pain are far better understood than central mechanisms, "centralization" of pain produces changes in the nervous system including persistent pain, alteration in personality, depression and suicide, lack of motivation, and perhaps, an addictive state

The P.A.I.N. Group focuses on the discovery of novel pain pathways (Systems Biology), mapping the CNS response/s in neuropathic pain and analgesics (Biotherapeutics), developing novel high-throughput methods for evaluating analgesics (Predictive Medicine), and incorporating results from animal research into human applications (Translational Medicine). The vision is to produce methods for objective evaluation of chronic pain and methods for evaluation of therapeutics.

The objectives of the program are:

To evaluate processing of pain in healthy subjects and patients with chronic pain

Define novel pain pathways

Define emotional and motivational components of pain

To define CNS regions involved in analgesic effects of drugs in health and disease

Define new targets

Define Novel mechanisms for analgesic targets

To develop surrogate human models of human disease

Testing of drugs in phase 1 trials for development

To define optimal preclinical models for evaluating analgesics

Basis for preclinical evaluation

Equivalence in health and disease

Boston Children's Hospital has been named the #1 children's hospital in the nation by U.S. News and World Report for the fifth year in a row! It's an honor that we could not have achieved without you. On behalf of every member of our Boston Children's team, thank you for inspiring us to be bolder, dream bigger, and make the impossible possible for our patients and families.